A study by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) last week revealed that almost 90 percent of ration cards that were declared invalid by the Jharkhand government by the Jharkhand government. The study also revealed that almost 56percent of the deleted ration cards were not linked with their Aadhaar cards. These numbers have come at a time when the Jharkhand government is planning a mass deletion of another chunk of ration cards reported The Telegraph India.
Titled “Identity verification standard in welfare programmes: Experimental evidence from India”, the study had surveyed 3,901 households in 10 districts of Jharkhand and it also put forth the startling revelations of several deaths that took place that were suspected to have happened due to starvation arising from the dispossession of the ration card, though the BJP government which was then in power never accepted that there was any loss of life due to hunger. The J-PAL study found out that 213 ration cards from the sample households were cancelled, but 26 cancellations were fake. This meant that only 12.2 percent of the 213 cancelled ration cards were fake and the rest 87.8 percent were genuine.
The state government had declared lakhs of ration cards invalid citing them to be ‘fake’. The Jharkhand Chief Secretary Rajbala Verma had also said that all ration cards not linked with the Aadhaar by April 5, 2017 would become ‘null and void’. In its statement the government first said that it ordered to cancel 11 lakh ration cards because the users couldn’t provide their Aadhaar details. The number was revised to 6.96 lakh.
At the time, right to food activists had stated that most of the cancelled cards belonged to bona fide beneficiaries who hadn’t even been informed before the cancellation and that the cancellations happened because of biometric failures due to lack of internet connectivity and charging of the Point of Sale (PoS) machines and corruption by dealers.
It was reported that 23 deaths took place due to starvation and non-availability of subsidized food grains from 2015 – 2019, a number that portrays the pitfalls of the decisions taken on basis of the document driven filtering process.
The Jharkhand report was drawn up by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar based on a survey by J-Pal which was co-founded by economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo who had won the Nobel Prize last year.
Asharfi Nand Prasad, state convener of the Right to Food campaign said, “This (J-PAL) study showed that nearly 90 per cent of the cancelled cards were not fake and also exposed the state government’s claim to the contrary,” and demanded that the government publish details of the deleted cards and stop further cancellation. “The government should follow a transparent process if it needs to delete ration cards, issue notice to the suspect cardholders and give them a chance to represent themselves,” Prasad said.
BJP leader turned independent MLA from Jamshedpur East Saryu Roy who was the food and civil supplies minister for the state at the time of the cancellation of the cards, said that he had opposed the deletion drive and that any decision that was taken was done bypassing him.
Saying that neither the figures nor the explanation had ever been placed before him, he said, “I opposed the cancellation of ration cards for lack of Aadhaar linkage and had demanded to know the exact number of cards cancelled and also the reason for which those were cancelled.”
The entire study by J-PAL may be read below.
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